1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for locking and unlocking a vehicle door, comprising a cylinder lock in which a rotor which rotates in response to a key operation is rotatably supported at a cylinder body, a door lock mechanism including a key operation input shaft which rotates to switch a locked state and an unlocked state of a door, and a torque cable for transmitting rotation of the rotor to the key operation input shaft, in which one end of the torque cable is connected to the rotor via a gear transmission mechanism accommodated in a gear case mounted to the cylinder body.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, the apparatus using the torque cable as means for transmitting the rotating force of the rotor of the cylinder lock to the key operation input shaft of the door lock mechanism in order to bring the door lock mechanism into an unlocked state in response to the key operation of the cylinder lock is known by U.S. Pat. No. 5,996,382, for example. In this apparatus, a second bevel gear fixed to one end of the torque cable is meshed with a first bevel gear coaxially connected to the rotor, whereby the torque cable makes a twisting operation in response to the rotation of the rotor.
When a variation occurs to the mounting position of the cylinder lock and the door lock mechanism to the door, there arises a possibility of lowering the ease of assembling the torque cable to the door lock mechanism due to excess or insufficiency of the torque cable.
In the above-described conventional apparatus, the torque cable is placed to have bending, and therefore some of the aforementioned variation is considered to be absorbed, but when the torque cable is placed linearly without having bending, or when the torque cable is guided by a guide member which cannot be bent, there is a possibility that the ease of assembling the torque cable to the door lock mechanism is lowered due to the variation.